6 Unorthodox Ways to Spark Creativity

The one when you’re about to start a new project. Or one when you’ve just hit a milestone and are entering the second phase of client work. Where you think your client’s expectations are too high to live up to.

They’re not easy days.

Weathering these moments is part of what separates the professional freelancers from the hobbyists. As painter Chuck Close said, “I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” Understanding how to jumpstart your creativity and get it flowing is crucial to enduring through trying days.”

Our take: Creativity is all about the unorthodox, so it really only makes sense to regularly change up how you inspire it. From working in the dark to switching around your sleep schedule, some of these tips seem more ridiculous than logical — but then, creative genius isn’t a logical phenomenon, is it?

6 Tips for Crafting a B2B Thought Leadership Marketing Strategy

“When your thought leadership marketing strategy is built on a foundation of customer questions, you must revisit these questions constantly. As industry trends change, you develop new products and services, and general business trends evolve—your answers to old and new questions need to evolve as well.

Google Trends is a great way to stay ahead of the curve. For example, if I focused on being a social media expert, looking at this comparison between searches for “social media marketing” and “content marketing”, I would probably want to shift my focus to content, as it’s trending up while social seems to be plateauing.”

Our take: This piece is full of simple advice, but it’s nonetheless sound. And, because even the most experienced marketers — especially them, in fact — need a reminder of how to do things the right way now and then, this serves as either an excellent starting guide or a nice refresher to bring people back to the basics of good strategy.

6 Ways Leaders Unknowingly Undervalue Their Employees

“A leader’s responsibility is to continuously provide their employees with the tools and resources to be successful. The best leaders are also those that can course correct before marketplace relevancy passes them by; they can anticipate crisis and manage change as they begin to see the requirements for success through a different lens. When employees notice inconsistent effort and/or a lack of maturity and professional reinvention from their leaders, they grow frustrated and in many cases their enthusiasm to contribute in meaningful ways may shut down – as they find themselves just going through the motions to get through each day.”

Our take: When employee engagement matters as much as it does — and it really, really does — it seems egregious that leaders around the world continue to make the same detrimental, highly avoidable mistakes that drive turnover rather than results. An employee can really only be as successful as they are empowered and supported, and it would behoove today’s managers to be accountable for their role in making that happen.